BY JOHNNY MULLIGAN
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Every Monday during first period is the same. Alongside the lesson, there are consistent complaints about the early hours for school and how much better off students would be coming into school an hour later.
Quite simply, this change could not happen because sports – especially during this time of year – would run out of daylight. Not all sports are able to turn on lights to extend practices, specifically spring sports which already struggle because of the shorter days. And even without the limitations from sports, the school should not cater to lazy students who complain about the early hours – especially when it is often self-imposed sleep deprivation.
The sun is down by 6:00 p.m. every night and spring sports would be unable to complete a full practice if they started at 4:00 p.m. rather than 3:00 p.m. Spring sports would have to lose a third or more of their practice time.
Students who complain that they do not have enough time to sleep are liars unless they play sports, have a job and are enrolled in a rigorous schedule. I do sports, have a fairly rigorous schedules and every night am ready to sleep by 10:30 p.m. Pretending that you do not have enough time to do your homework after school is an illogical excuse for your procrastination. Even students who have extremely hard schedules have enough time to complete their homework if they get home, put their nose to the ground and just work. Sure, I miss the good ol’ days at Buljan when school started at 9:05p.m., but that is just an unrealistic schedule for RHS to adopt.
The “extra” hour in the morning only takes an hour away from yourself after school and forces students to stay awake later into the night which just exacerbates the problem. Studies show that students who wake up early have higher grades than students who stay up late.
The only students who can benefit from this new system would be kids who do nothing after school and they do not take work-intensive classes and honestly the school should not be catering to these students. They inflict their own fate by staying up too late even without a reason. They have no room to complain about these things.
This change in schedule would also causes problems for students who do not have a ride to school in the morning. Many parents start work before the current time of school and wouldn’t be able to take their children to school with the later hours. This would unnecessarily force students to find other means to get to school which in some cases would be impossible because they have no other options.
Another thing is that we are growing up and preparing for the real world but we still complain about waking up at 7:00 a.m. All four of my siblings have gone through college, and they have all had early morning classes. And even after those morning classes ended they got jobs that, surprise, started at 7:30 a.m. I am sure there is some way to craft a schedule without having morning classes but none of my siblings have managed to and future students probably won’t either. And unless you are planning on being a night-time security guard you will be at work by 8:00 a.m. at 90 percent of jobs.
Just go to bed earlier, simple as that. Students who stay up all night on Twitter and Instagram deserve to be tired in the morning. Do not blame the system because of your lack of sleep. And if you really are staying up too late doing homework – that is tough but you chose your schedule and deserve the fate you brought upon yourself.
